gradually reduced to half his usual quantity of wine. Dr. Percy’s next difficulty was how to supply the purse-full and purse-proud citizen with motive and occupation. Mr. Panton had an utter aversion and contempt for all science and literature; he could not conceive that any man “could sit down to read for amusement,” but he enjoyed a party of pleasure in a good boat on the water, to one of the _aits_ or islets in the Thames at the right season, to be regaled with eel-pie. One book he had read, and one play he liked--no, not a play, but a pantomime. The book was Robinson Crusoe--the pantomime, Harlequin Friday. He had been heard to say, that if ever he had a villa, there should be in it an island like Robinson Crusoe’s; and why not a fortress, a castle, and a grotto? this would be something new; and why should he not have his fancy, and why should not there be _Panton’s Folly_ as well as any of the thousand _Follies_ in England? Surely he was rich enough to have a Folly. His physician cherished this bright idea. Mrs. Panton was all this time dying to have a villa on the Thames. Dr. Percy proposed that one should be made on Mr. Panton’s plan. The villa was bought, and every day the hypochondriac--hypochondriac now no more--went to his villa-Crusoe, where he fussed, and furbished, and toiled at his desert island in the Thames, as hard as ever he laboured to make his _plum_ in the counting-house. In _due course_ he recovered his health, and, to use his own expression, “became as alert as any man in all England of his inches in the girth, thanks be to Dr. Percy!” We find the following letter from Dr. Percy, written, as it appears, some months after his first attendance upon Mr. Panton. “Yes, my dear friends at home, Alfred tells you truth, and does not flatter much. The having set up again this old citizen, who was thought bankrupt in constitution, has done me honour in the city; and, as Alfred assures you, has spread my name through Broad-street, and Fleet-street, and Milk-street, embracing the wide extremes between High-Holborn and St. Mary Axe, ‘And even Islington has heard my fame.’ “In earnest, I am getting fast into practice in the city--and Rosamond must not turn up her aristocratic lip at the city--very _good_ men, in every sense of the word, some of the best men I know, inhabit what she is pleased to call the wrong end of the town. “Mr. Gresham is unceasing and indefatigable in his kindness to me. I consider it as an instance of this kindness that he has found employment for my poor friend, O’Brien; has made him his porter--a pleasanter place than he had with the painter that pleased nobody: O’Brien sees me almost every day, and rejoices in what he calls my prosperity.